Free Ask Me Why I Hurt by M.D. Randy Christensen

We stared at each other, and she stepped forward and kissed me. The kiss seemed to last forever. When it was done, Amy tucked her face against my pounding chest. “What are we going to do now?” she asked. It was a telling sign of our relationship that after we returned to Phoenix, we started the process of buying a house together. We hadbeen looking for weeks before one day Amy turned to me in my truck and said teasingly, “We love each other, and yet we’ve never even said it.”
    I turned around, took a deep, delighted breath, and responded, “I completely and totally love you.”
    I was thinking of that magical moment when I came through the door and unloaded the contents of my pockets onto the side table. I jerked them out in a hurry: phone, keys, codebooks. I opened my mouth to call Amy. But there was something about the atmosphere in the house. The air felt different. There was a palpable tension. I walked into the kitchen. Amy was sitting where I expected her to be, an ignored magazine in front of her.
    “Honey?” I asked, coming in.
    She turned to me, her face bright, incandescent, and beautiful.
    “I’m pregnant,” she said.
    I felt all my worries about the van fall away. I stepped forward and gave her a huge hug. Amy was ecstatic. I felt that together we were seeing the same vistas, embarking on the same journey. My heart raced with excitement. I’m going to be a father, I thought, I will have a son or daughter. I realized that along with my joy came brand-new concerns. Suddenly I had worries I had never had. Was our budget enough? Did I need to plan for college? I remembered all the times as a doctor I had seen new fathers, and they had told me about the pressures of fatherhood. Now I understood. Along with those worries were some that came from my experiences on the van. My world was full of kids who had diseases and problems. I wanted desperately not to have these worries for my own children. I held my wife and kissed her, rocking back and forth in our joy.

4
     
MARY’S JOURNEY
    W hen Mary told me her story, she disclosed her real name. I called Child Protective Services the next day. Mary, it turned out, was seventeen. Her father had been sent to prison for sexually abusing her. The original charge was rape, but he had pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of sexual abuse instead. During the years he molested Mary he had kept her secluded from her other family members. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone what was going on. Mary was terrified. After his arrest Child Protective Services had found Mary a home with an aunt who lived in Chandler, right outside Phoenix. But when the aunt went to school to pick Mary up, she had already run away. “Mary was sixteen at the time,” the social worker said. “She’s been missing ever since.” She paused and then asked curiously, “Do you know where she was hiding?” I thought of the hole in the desert. I wondered how long Mary would have kept living there if she had not come to our van.
    There was a storm of phone calls. By the time we were back in Tempe the following week the aunt was coming to get Mary once again. The social worker assured me that the aunt was nothing like her brother: “The two haven’t talked for years. He neverlet her meet Mary.” As remarkable as this story sounded, I wasn’t surprised. In my work as a pediatrician I had often been struck by the fragmentation of the American family. I asked what the aunt was like. “She works in a nursing home. She’s a nice single lady, a bit of an old maid, to use an old-fashioned term. No criminal history, not even a traffic ticket. Apparently her hobby is needlepoint. She’s never had any kids of her own but said she’d be happy to take Mary.”
    Mary was waiting outside in one of the folding lawn chairs, biting her lips. “I didn’t even know I had an aunt,” she mumbled. “Maybe she won’t like me.”
    “She’ll like you just fine,” Jan said. “What’s not to